Background

The oldest light sources are the
stars, and in our case the Sun. On earth the oldest source
of light is burning something.Wiki
List of Light Sources

Characteristics

The key characteristics of a light
source are:

how bright

what color or colors of light it emits

what is the spacial radiation pattern

efficiency

Types of Light Source

Indoor Air Pollution

When any fuel in burned it consumes oxygen and gives off
combustion products. In The Art of Illumination by Louis
Bell, McGraw-Hill Book Co, 1912 (Google Book) there's a table on
page 155:

Consumed
per hr.

Candle1
Power

Oxygen
removed
cu ft

CO2
added
cu ft

Moisture
added
cu ft

Heat
calories

Vitiation Equal
to Adult
Persons

Tallow
candles

2200 grains

16

10.7

7.3

8.2

1400

12.0

Sperm
candles

1740 "

16

9.6

6.5

6.5

1137

11.0

Paraffin
oil

992 "

16

6.2

4.5

3.5

1030

7.5

Kerosene
oil

909"

16

5.9

4.1

3.3

1030

7.0

Coal
gas, bat-wing burner

5.5 cu ft

16

6.5

2.8

7.3

1194

5.0

Coal
gas, Argand burner

4.8 "

16

5.8

2.6

6.4

1240

4.3

Coal gas
regenerative burner

3.2 "

32

3.6

1.7

4.2

760

2.8

Coal gas
Welsbach burner

3.5 "

60

4.1

1.8

4.7

763

3.0

Note 1: Lumens = 12.57 * Standard Candle Power, so 16 SCP is
about 200 Lumens. This was the size of Edison's light bulb
for many years.
The author has this comment:

"The replacement of candles and
lamps by gas worked a revolution, not only in the convenience of
artificial lighting, but in its hygienic relations. The
older illuminants in proportion to their luminous effect removed
prodigious amounts of oxygen from the air and gave off large
quantities of carbonic acid. In the days of candles a
brilliantly lighted room was almost of necessity one in which
the air was bad."

and

"It is somewhat startling to
realize, but very desirable to remember, that a common gas
burner will vitiate the air of a room as much as four or five
persons, in so far, at least, as vitiation can be defined by
change in the chemical composition of the air."

This is still a problem for women and children in third world
countries because they are mostly in the home which uses flame
based light and cooking.

There are some modern arc lamps that use Tungsten instead of
carbon electrodes (Wiki: Arc Lamp, )
for automotive headlights (HID)
and other applications where a very bright light is
needed. Different gases can be used in the lamp such as
(Wiki links follow:) Neon,
Argon,
Xenon,
Krypton,
Sodium,
metal halide, Mercury vapor. Vietnam era
VSS-1/GSS-14 or VSS-3 Xenon arc lights were fitted on tanks and
gun trucks, some with near IR filters to they were not typically
visible to the enemy.

All (Wiki:fluorescent lamps) are
really Mercury vapor arc lamps with a (Wiki:
phosphor) coating on the inside of the glass to convert
the UV to visible light. This includes the Compact
Fluorescent lamps that are green in the sense of using less
electricity but not green in the sense of having Mercury inside
them.

Burning Liquid Fuel

Mantle type lamps produce much
more light than wick type lamps. But mantle lamps do not
have a hot body spectrum but instead have narrow peaks in the
spectrum due to the rare earth elements that are impregnated
into the mantle (Wiki).
This is very similar to the "white" LEDs now on the market or to
florescent lights.

I think the US GI M1950 gas single burner stove is from the
Petromax design and was also made by Coleman as their camping
stove.
The original air pump was made like a small version of a bicycle
tire pump using leather as the seal. The O-Ring
modification replaces the leather with an O-ring making for a
better seal.

Safety - to prevent the flame from igniting an explosive
atmosphere.Wolf
- still makes electric lamps for explosive atmospheres, some are
powered by compressed air

Burning Gas Fuel

These are mostly Gas mantle
types. This would include natural gas like was used for
public lamps or propane like in camping lamps.

Also "carbide
lamps" that combine water and calcium
carbide to make acetylene gas. Note that you can not
compress acetylene gas, but instead it needs to be absorbed in a
liquid, like in welding tanks. The carbide lamps typically
have a long skinny white flame that puts out soot. There
are small versions of this lamp made to apply the soot to gun
sights to make them black (to reduce the reflection of the sun).

Burning Solid Fuel

Candles are the most common but
there are also chemical pellets what will burn. A wood
fire makes light and heat.

Electrical Lamps

This was one of Edison's
inventions. 223898
Electric Lamp, T.A. Edison, Jan 27, 1880, 313/315 ; 201/25;
252/502; 264/29.2; 264/DIG.19; 313/333; 313/344; 313/578
- uses a heated filament.
Note that a filament type lamp will last longer if the filament
is horizontal. If the filament is vertical then the top
gets hotter and fails sooner. Most bulbs are designed to
be either screwed into an overhead fixture or a table lamp but
if that same bulb is screwed into a makeup mirror it will fail
sooner. There's a trade off in how long a filament lamp
will operate and it's rated voltage and brightness. Also
there is a cost associated with bulb replacement. All of
these need to be taken into account when deciding which bulb is
a "better buy".

There are also arc type lamps. Gas filled lamps like neon
get their color from the gas used. Electroluminescent (Wiki:EL)
lamps use a very small amount of power but degrade with use and
do not look nice after a year or more. Light Emitting
Diodes (LED) and the newer Organic LEDs
are semiconductor junctions that emit light. The
fluorescent lamp is an electrical discharge type light source
and the compact
fluorescent is very energy efficient, but contains
Mercury.514170
Incandescent Electrical Light, N. Tesla, Feb 6, 1894, 313/315 -
now called a plasma
lamp.

A strobe
light is only on for a very short amount of time, but is
very bright. Although there are Xenon arc lamps that can
be on all the time, they are very specialized.

When a fluorescent lamp bulb is in an RF field it will glow even
though it's not connected to anything.
Livermore, Calif - Longest
burning
light bulb -" The improved incandescent lamp, invented by
Adolphe A. Chaillet, was made by the Shelby
Electric Company. It is a hand blown bulb with carbon
filament. Approximate wattage-4 watts. Left burning continuously
in firehouse as a nightlight over the fire trucks."Museum of Historic
Discharge Lamps

Radioactive (Self Luminous)

2361319Luminous marker, Paul
John E (United
States Radium Corp), Oct 24, 1944, 250/467.1,
252/6462953684Self-luminous light sources, Machutchin
John G, Prosser
David L, Wright
Charles H (United
States Radium Corp), Sep 20, 1960, -
Tritium250/462.1,
310/301, 252/646, 362/84, 313/54, 313/485
In the 1930s and during W.W.II there were clocks, watches and
aircraft instruments made where the dial face numbers were
hand painted using a combination of radium (Wiki)
and phosphorescent (self glowing) paint. At the time
they didn't know about the health hazards of radium and the
women who applied the radium laced paint put the brush in
their mouth to form a fine point. See the PBS
documentary American Experience: The Poisoner's Handbook
or the book The Poisoner's Handbook.
In reading the reviews of the book on Amazon there are those who
know chemistry pointing out many technical errors and there are
reviews that give the book 5 stars because they were fascinated
by the factual history.

When they are activated they give
off light. Commonly used in Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT) and
fluorescent lamps, white LEDs, light sticks.
Some laundry detergents have phosphors to make the whites look
whiter (they glow under UV light).
A phosphor can be activated by light (including UV or black
light), electrons, radioactivity or chemically.
A scintillator can be a crystal, plastic or liquid that emits a
photon of light when it absorbs electromagnetic or atomic
particle radiation.

Generate light when struck by
electrons, neutrons, photons or other ionizing radiation. Also used in some
LEDs to convert near UV to other colors like white.

Measuring

When what you're measuring is the
brightness of "light" then the measurements are weighted so that
the answer has the same spectral response of the human eye.
This is different than measuring the power of the light source,
which has a flat spectral response.

There are a number of characteristics of a light source that can
be measured. These can be measured only in the visible range
(400 to 700 nm) which is done to determine how a human eye will
react to the light, or over a broader wavelength range to see how
photo sensors will react to the radiation. There is only a
small band of
radiation with a wavelength shorter than 400 nm that can propagate
through the atmosphere, but there are many orders of magnitude of
longer wavelength electromagnetic radiation that propagate called
near infrared, far infrared (heat), then various radio waves.

Amount of visible (Total) light it provides on some surface

The historical method of measuring the visible brightness of a
light was using the Weston
Model 594 Photronic Cell and I believe is the basis of many
of the specifications relating to visible light.

The Amprobe (Meterman) LM631A Digital Light Meter is the most
popular meter used on the Candle Power Forum for testing flashlights. It has
calibrated readings in foot-candles (Wiki: foot-candle)or
lux (Wiki: lux) (1
lumen per square meter). One foot-candle is equal to
approximately 10.764 lux.

Total amount of visible (Total) light it generates (using in
integrating sphere)

Visible(Total) Spectrum

An Optical Spectrum Analyzer is used to measure the brightens at
different wavelengths. A number of them are on my OSA web
page.

While looking for Lighter patents in
class 431 Combustion for the year 1906 most of them were for
lighting either open flame or incandescent. Fuels were
natural gas, gasoline, alcohol, oil.The work carbureter showed up
in relation to mixing the fuel and air for lighting.